


Like A Stone

by volatilehearted (anomalagous)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-10
Updated: 2014-10-10
Packaged: 2018-02-20 15:00:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2433002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomalagous/pseuds/volatilehearted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In retrospect, they probably should have known, collectively, better than to take Stiles Stilinski along on a meeting that required any sort of decorum.</p><p>(Also known as: Stiles' mouth borrows more trouble than he can handle, and it's Scott who has to carry the excess.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like A Stone

In retrospect, they probably should have known, _collectively_ , better than to take Stiles Stilinski along on a meeting that required any sort of _decorum_.

Stiles Stilinski, whose mouth ran faster than his common sense even in the  _best_ of times, whose first and final response to the cold fingers of  _fear_ around his heart was to fight back, to dig his hole deeper and lash out with the sharpest barbs he could forge in the privacy of his own mind. Stiles Stilinski, who didn't always fight with  _sarcasm_ but could and  _would_ shape his words into  _cruelty_ or  _biting insight_ or  _insult_ when he felt backed into a corner. Or when it was Tuesday.

It had been Stiles,  _of course_ , who had done all the research on the Seelie, spent late nights the entire week before the appointed time in the back of the animal clinic pouring over every book or note that Deaton had ever made to arm his pack properly for the encounter. It was  _Stiles_ who had first noticed that while the Seelie were known as the  _good fae_ , that didn't mean that they were  _nice_ or  _tolerant_ or even  _human_ , and that the pack was probably still going to have to be  _especially careful_ not to give away more than they intended to give over the course of the discussion.

And it had been Stiles who, within fifteen minutes of getting through the formalized, ritualistic greeting of the fae delegation, had gotten so  _frustrated_ with the Seelie's lack of humanity--why he'd have ever expected them to have an ounce of it when he'd talked himself breathless telling the whole pack they  _explicitly did not_ a night before--that he'd called them out on it, called into question their senses of loyalty and honor and, most poignantly, of love. With a straight face, or as close to one as Stiles could manage with his eyebrows flat over his eyes and his mouth quirking up into a purse around the bitterness of his own dialogue, he had told the court of Fae whose code included the notion that  _amor vincit omnia_ that they  _actually_ had no idea what love was at  _all_ . He'd probably been gearing up to try and set Scott up as some kind of personification of the concept of  _agape_ , but he'd never gotten that far.

The lead of the delegation, a creature so impossibly beautiful that  _woman_ didn't even seem an appropriate word to describe her, had merely turned her face to Stiles, smiled warmly at him and the barely-restrained frustration on  _his_ face. She had floated closer to him as if in a dream and purred with a voice like bluebells on the wind that, perhaps, if Stiles was so convinced he had any idea what  _love_ was, he ought to demonstrate by example so that she and her entourage, burdened by the  _obvious_ ignorance of thousands of years, could learn. She had used his  _real name_ , although no one could account for why she even  _knew_ it, and she'd leaned forward to kiss the middle of his forehead with a tenderness only accountable in mothers.

Stiles' features had spasmed briefly through shock but not pain, and then his eyes had rolled back and he'd crumpled at the knees. Scott was barely fast enough to catch him before he hit the ground.

It had all very nearly gone irreparably south then; Scott was only restrained from letting the red haze of his rage coax him into attacking the departing Seelie by Lydia's quick thinking and by the weight of Stiles' body helpless in his arms. Stiles was  _breathing_ , at least, which was more than Scott felt he probably had any right to hope for given the circumstances, and his alpha's power could find no pain in the pale human to drain away. He just couldn't wake Stiles  _up_ , either.

One of the lesser fairies had stayed behind, out of duty or curiosity or some other emotion none of the pack would ever be able to identify. It turned out to be fortuitous, because they found that it could be  _persuaded_ to barter the information of what was  _wrong_ with their human for a three-ounce bottle of fox fire. Scott had felt a little bad about asking Kira to fill the bottle, but they'd really had no other choice.

Stiles, as it turned out, was asleep, suspended in some sort of  _fae stasis_ that Scott felt Stiles  _himself_ would have probably had a fancy word for, if he were awake to speak it. As long as his body was not physically injured or destroyed, Stiles would remain exactly how he was, in good health, needing neither food nor water, neither exercise or relief. He would not age and he would not grow sick, he wouldn't change, not at  _all_ , until he received  _true love's kiss_ .

Scott was pretty sure he would have remembered if the titular character of Sleeping Beauty had ever been a freckled boy with an upturned nose before.

The heaviness of Stiles' body in his arms as they transported him back to the Stilinski household couldn't match the heaviness in Scott's heart.

*               *                *

Scott can hear the tension in Sheriff Stilinski's breathing as the man stands beside him, looking down at Stiles' form stretched out on his bed. It's a change in pressure, a hypersonic _whine_ that hasn't been there before, which Scott is sure is the result of the Sheriff trying to hold his stress out at arm's length and keep it from overwhelming him. It's a skill Scott has been observing in the adults around him, lately, in his mother and Stiles' father and Chris Argent. He's been trying to learn how to do it himself. This is more practice than he ever wanted.

"So he's just going to lay there like that until his true love kisses him?" John is saying as Scott tunes back into his voice. His face looks as stressed as his breathing sounds, lines carved deep into his expression. His eyes seem focused on nothing at all and Scott wonders if the Sheriff just can't quite handle having to see his son in such a state  _yet again_ . "No need for food or bathroom breaks or worrying about bedsores or...?"

"Yeah." Scott feels like his throat is too tight for words but he forces them out anyway. "Like Sleeping Beauty. He just kind of lays there until the spell is broken."

"True love's kiss." The Sheriff glances up to Scott's face, expression inscrutable behind the force of a squint that Scott has seen on Stiles' face a hundred times.

"Yeah."

"For a kid who's been chasing a red-headed pipe dream for years."

" _Yeah_ ."

There is a tremble in the hand that reaches up to scrub over John's features. "Well, at least he's  _alive_ ."

A barb of grief digs in under the bottom-most of Scott's ribs, near the now-invisible scar site of the bite that turned him. No parent's hopes and dreams for their child should ever be reduced to the binary question of whether or not that child was alive.

The Sheriff grips Scott's shoulder briefly and Scott isn't sure if he's trying to give or take comfort. Either way, there is very little comfort to be had between them. It lays in the air and on the back of their tongues like a bitter aftertaste until John turns to leave the room with his head hung too low between his shoulders.

Scott watches him leave, staring out of the empty doorway at nothing at all. When he turns his gaze back to Stiles' still face against the pillow, he feels something inside himself start to turn to stone.

 

*               *                *

 

Lydia stands at the end of the bed with her jaw set and her arms folded aggressively over her chest. Even after all this time--which feels like much longer than it actually has been--she tries to stand alone for as long as possible, unwilling to let anyone inside the bulwark of her heart since Allison's death. Seeing the expression Lydia is trying to hide behind a stoney impassivity, Scott thinks maybe he understands. He leans closer, trying to impart the idea that he is there for her without invading her sense of independence. It's a delicate balance and Scott is fairly certain that he's _lousy_ at it. There has always been something about Lydia that Scott just doesn't quite understand.

She turns her head towards him without turning her eyes; those lay behind and skip along the scenery of Stiles' room before she's  _really_ looking at the Alpha. "So you want me to kiss him, after he got himself into this mess by mouthing off to the fairy court that he, himself, specifically told us not to mouth off to, on the presumption that it'll count as true love because he's had a completely unrealistic crush on me since third grade?"

It sounds pathetic laid out in front of them like that, but Stiles looks pretty pathetic laying on the bed in front of them as well, the long fingers of his hands carefully folded over the blanket. Stiles didn't do that himself—Scott is fairly sure his mother or Stiles' rather did—and the whole gesture just looks a little unnatural. “Yeah, I guess...I guess that's about it. I just...”

She fixes him with those sharp eyes, and when she does, Scott can already tell this isn't going to work. She doesn't love Stiles, not in the way he's pretty sure the fairy magic wants. She may  _like_ Stiles, they may be close now and she may be willing to sacrifice a lot of things, up to and including her life, for the boy, but Scott has the sudden insight as he looks at her that the  _love_ , the unconditional vessel in which she had invested her heart, was  _gone_ . He wonders if she ever told Allison how she felt.

It doesn't really matter. Lydia makes a slightly disgusted noise in the front of her mouth and turns, moving to the side of Stiles' bed with short, conservative motions. They are completely at odds with the tenderness with which she leans over, skipping her fingertips over Stiles' forehead before she leans in and presses her mouth to his.

Despite himself, Scott sucks in a breath and holds it.

Nothing happens. Lydia frowns, tries again, bracing both hands against the sides of Stiles' face. Scott imagines it must be miserable, kissing a slack face that doesn't respond, that breathes and is just warm enough to be alive and does nothing else. She remains bowed over Stiles' form for a few seconds before she presses her mouth into a thin line, swallowing, nodding. For the first time Scott begins to think maybe Lydia had believed it might work. Something has been twisted out of shape in this moment and Scott can't help but think it was by his own hands.

Lydia leaves without even looking at him.

 

*               *                *

 

He's asleep in a chair he drug into the room from the guest room when Malia comes in through the window. Scott is on his feet before he's really awake, claws out, eyes red with fury, and she freezes with both hands on the sill. He can tell from her ice-blue eyes and the tension in her body that she knows she should be submitting in the face of her Alpha's fury but she doesn't _want_ to. The wolf in him wants to make her submit but Scott takes it by its scruff, as he always does. He gives Malia a little leeway and backs up enough to allow her to enter the room fully.

She keeps her back to the window as she straightens up, looking between Scott and Stiles on the bed and Scott again in short jolts of motion. “I thought I'd...”

Scott blinks and turns to consider the edges of Stiles' face in the dark room, the swoop of the boy's nose as it points towards the ceiling. It doesn't move, the angle hasn't changed since they laid him there. There's not even so much as a twitch of his nostrils. Scott knows. He's watched for it. He frowns, although he isn't quite sure at once, voice quiet like he has to be afraid of waking Stiles at all. “...do you  _love_ him?”

“I don't know.” Malia says with a sort of casual bluntness that makes something in Scott's chest clench. “Coyotes don't really do  _love_ . But I like him, and him being like this is making the whole pack crazy, and I can't  _stand_ that. It makes me want to run off into the woods.”

He never thought would have identified with that statement so much. He had always thought of himself as the kind of person who put down roots quickly and easily. Now his roots are on fire.

She doesn't ask permission and Scott isn't quite sure why some part of him felt like she should have. Malia just turns and slinks to the side of Stiles' bed, looking more like a coyote trapped in a wrong-shaped skin than he's seen in months. There's no pretense or prevarication. Malia just leans over and kisses Stiles, soundly and firmly, straight on his mouth.

He doesn't respond.

Malia pulls back, grows still as if to mimic Stiles' unnatural stillness, watching for any change. Her nose twitches twice, three times, and then she leans down and tries again.

This time, when nothing happens, she pulls back by steps, shrugging her shoulders and pulling her sweater around her body in a gesture so human it's anathema to the way she's moving, the way she's tucking herself back out of the window. She pauses, crouched on the roof, and meets Scott's eyes. Her words are as matter-of-fact and lead-weight heavy as before. “I guess I don't.”

Her eyes flash blue and then she's gone, swallowed seamlessly by the night in a way Scott is sure he'll never manage.

 

*               *                *

 

Lacrosse becomes a burden rather than a release. Scott hadn't realized how much of Stiles' pre-game 'briefings' would actually sink through his skull until he wasn't getting them. The other teams make a mockery of him without even trying, and Scott only manages to keep his position as team captain because Kira and Liam work overtime to cover up his glaring flaws. He's distracted. He knows he is. He can't bring himself to care that much.

No one talks about missing number 24, and Scott loses track of how many times he sees Coach turn to Stiles' place on the bench for information and stumble when he doesn't get it.

 

*               *                *

 

Sometimes he wakes up on the floor of Stiles' room in the middle of the night and doesn't remember how he got there. Neither the Sheriff or his mother ever says a thing about it, but after the fifth or sixth time it happens, the Sheriff starts cooking him breakfast in the morning. They eat in silence and it's the most awkward, heartbreaking thing that Scott has ever known, short of the awkward, heartbreaking thing lying still in his bed upstairs.

 

*               *                *

 

It takes an entire month before the first person asks him when he is going to _get over it_. Scott is so taken off-guard by the question that it legitimately takes him five minutes to figure out what it even means. It's Malia who asks, of course, because although she's made a lot of real, legitimate progress she still doesn't understand things like _social gentleness_. Running away from dead weight is her natural response to anything. He shouldn't be angry, because it's just who Malia is, where she is in life right now.

He still pins her to the wall by the throat and shows his fangs to the gums before the others talk him down from his abrupt fury.

Scott spends twenty minutes apologizing and Malia just shrugs it off, watching him with some kind of sharpness in her gaze that he can't account for. Whatever she's thinking, she doesn't share it with Scott, but she walks away like she's going to lick her proverbial wounds—any real ones he left with his claws faded almost before they were made—and he wonders what she saw in his blood red eyes that she isn't talking about.

After she leaves, he feels too awkward around the rest of his pack, like he has this entire time, like one of his legs is far longer than the other and he's been limping in circles for more than a month. Scott leaves the meet-up without telling anyone where he's going, and they don't ask, because they already know. Everybody already knows, because more and more, Scott spends his every waking moment with a boy who has no more waking moments to share. Part of him knows that it isn't healthy, that there isn't anything he can do about the situation and marking vigil in Stiles' room doesn't get him any closer to a solution, but he can't bring himself to commit Stiles to that glass coffin, even in his mind. The size of the hole that Stiles has left in his heart grows exponentially every day and Scott can't help himself but tug at the ragged, bloody edges of it. It's like picking at a scab until he's  _certain_ it will leave a scar simply because he wants a memory of the injury.

Scott has learned a lot about Stiles in the time he's been sleeping. He had already known a lot about Stiles in the macro, broad brush strokes of understanding like 'Stiles has trouble focusing' and 'Stiles likes obscene amounts of cheese on his pizza'. Now he's learned the fine details that Stiles was never still enough for Scott to study, like the exact mapping of the flaws of his skin, the spice-sweetness of his scent at rest, the way his dark eyelashes fan out over his cheeks and the contrast of his complexion against his hair. He's memorized the subtle openness in Stiles' mouth as he lays still, the angle of his nose and the sound of his heart on auto-pilot. He's come to understand the space-vacuum of the missing things, like Stiles' fidgety fingertips digging into his collarbone when he has an idea to share with Scott, the sound of his laughter exploding out of his chest like wartime violence, the expression on Stiles' face when that happens like he's taken off-guard by the force of his own reaction. He knows the exact value of Stiles' impact on his life by the size and shape of the crater it left behind.

Watching that gangly body in the bed, still placed exactly as he left it, Scott is suddenly overwhelmed with the sense that he may never know those things again. His life stretches out before him, made long and durable by his werewolf blood, all with the distinct possibility, maybe even  _likelihood_ , that he is never going to hear another of Stiles' borderline inappropriate jokes or feel the jostle of their shoulders together, or see the way Stiles' eyes turn the color of good whiskey when the sun strikes through them and makes them almost seem backlit. Scott's entire world fades out to black and white around the mental swatch of that color and he's so  _weary_ .

There's a tinny voice in the back of his mind that sound a little like his father and a little like Peter Hale, asking Scott if maybe Malia wasn't a little bit  _right_ . It cuts a new wound and puts pressure on it—not the life-saving kind—but seeding that first tiny thought that this state, for Stiles, may be perpetual, it might be  _forever_ , and maybe, just maybe, there's a life for Scott to attend to that isn't contained by these four walls.

He strangles the voice mercilessly until it can no longer even squeak. He won't give up on Stiles. Not after so little time, not after everything Stiles has done for him. He just needs to take tonight to get some space, get some  _air_ , and come back with his heart buttressed up against all of this pain.

Scott steps close to Stiles' bed like he's approaching an altar, lifting one hand to smooth its palm over Stiles' forehead and push his hair back. He expects Stiles' skin to be cold and clammy every time he touches it, but it isn't; the boy is warm and it's almost like Scott could expect him to flinch, scrunch his face up as he does when he doesn't want to wake. He waits, as he always does, counting heartbeats up to nine because Stiles once told him that's an  _extra magic_ number, and nothing happens.

Swallowing the stone in his mouth and letting it settle in the bottom of his stomach instead, Scott leans down, pressing his lips warmly to the middle of Stiles' forehead. He squeezes his eyes tight and holds the kiss there for a few moments, trying not to cry on his best friend's unnaturally still expression as he does. He can hear the heartbreak in his own voice as he pulls away. “...I miss you, buddy. I miss you so much.”

He's almost all the way to the door when the raspy voice fills the silence in the room, fills the silence thundering in his ears, fills the empty vessel he's become with something like light, it fills  _everything_ , everything that was or ever could be.

“... Scotty?”

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm terrible at titling things but the title comes from Audioslave's Like A Stone because I realized as I was trying to FIND a title that the lyrics fit pretty well what was going on in Scott's head this whole fic, so there you go.


End file.
